It was Amelia's third birthday this past weekend, and I was able to give her her sweater, and she loved it! It made me so happy to see her enjoy it. She told me the bows on the cuffs were like butterflies! There are pictures of her in it which show the scallops better, but I loved her impish delight in this picture (I have permission to share her photos here, and limited permission to share pictures of Winifred - just so you know why the photos I have shared are oriented the way they are).

The bear paw mittens are made (again) and I think they are finally the way I want them. I will work on the claws and pads this week. This is the fifth or sixth iteration of the mittens, though. I will use the same dark brown wool for the claws and pads as I did in the sweater. (That giant flower is one of three from a centerpiece I won at a work related dinner with Rich last night - we also came home with ten! bottles of wine from that dinner).

I began both Al Qidyssat Katrin min al-Iskandaria (Saint Catherine of Alexandria) and Prettyish Wilderness this past week. Well, I restarted the first, and began the latter. I really like the gray of Katrin. It is purple based and has some beige and tan and a little pink in it, so it isn't so one dimensional. The pinks and champagnes in the yarn for the shawl is quite feminine and delightful. Both of these are intended for some of my extended family members. The mittens should be finished by this weekend, I think, and then I will focus more on these two. Prettyish Wilderness will be my evening and weekend knitting.

I read The Rushworth Family Plot and enjoyed it, with the same issues I have had with the other books. She slams modernism into the story, and dithers about whether or not using the words slave and slave holder is too triggering, while missing things like how calling a woman Mrs. Caroline Allerdyce (or Mrs. Fanny Bertram, etc.) would be presenting her as a divorced woman in that time. Even though there were people who dissented from the moral and social norms of the regency era, we know that they did not speak and act the way she portrays. The author simply does not trust her readers to come to the "right" conclusions so has to stop story telling to lecture. She simply cannot help herself, it seems, and also tends to force modernist thinking into all the stories. It constantly takes you out of the world she is creating and the time she is representing, so you never fully forget you are reading a story, and never simply become a part of it. All that said, I still do enjoy the intertwining of the characters from Jane Austen's novels, the futures we get to imagine in these books, and especially the characters of Juliet Tilney and Jonathan Darcy (though I think the autism angle is a bit over the top and forced, much like the rest of the modernist ideals she overlays on the story elsewhere). These books are fiction, and supposed to be stories rather than sermons. I wish modern authors spent as much time on the story telling as they do on moralizing. It is quite possible to get the moral across without being didactic.

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Labels: Books, Design, Family, FOs, Homemaking, Knitting, WIP, Yarn Along

// posted by Ranee @ Arabian Knits @ 9:34 PM